Constructivist Turn in Political Representation

A comprehensive introduction to a major new approach in the study of democratic representation.

This is the first edited volume to provide a comprehensive introduction and a critical exploration of the constructivist turn in political representation. Divided into three thematic parts, the 13 newly commissioned essays presented here develop constructivist turn as a central concept advancing the insight that there can be no democratic politics without representation because constituencies, or groups, exist as agents of democratic politics only insofar as they are represented. Complete with an original English translation of 'Democracy and Representation' by the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, this volume delivers a rich critical intervention in democratic theory.

Lisa Disch is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (1994), The Tyranny of the Two-Party System (2002) and co-editor, with Mary Hawkesworth, of the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (2016).

Nadia Urbinati is a Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. She is the author of Mill on Democracy (2002), Representative Democracy (2006) and Democracy Disfigured (2014).

Mathijs van de Sande is a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen.

List of contents

1. Introduction: The End of Representative Politics
Lisa Disch

Section One
The Constructivist Turn: Anglo-American and Continental Intellectual Genealogies

2. Rethinking Representation: Eight Theoretical Issues and a Postscript
Dario Castiglione and Mark E. Warren

3. Machiavelli against the Venice Myth: The 16th Century Dialogue on the Nature of Political Representation
Jan Biba

4. Power without Representation is Blind, Representations without Power are Empty
Bernard Flynn

5. Two Regimes of the Symbolic: Radical Democracy Between Romanticism and Structuralism
Warren Breckman

6. Political Representation: The View From France
Raf Geenens

7. Democracy and Representation
Claude Lefort (translated by Greg Conti)

Section Two
The Constructivist Turn: Normative Challenges

8. Representation as Proposition: Democratic Representation after the Constructivist Turn
Samuel Hayat

9. Don Alejandro's Fantasy: On Representation and Radical Democracy
Oliver Marchart

10. Pinning Down Representation
Lasse Thomassen

11. Representative Constructivism's Conundrum
Nadia Urbinati

Section Three
Constructivist Representation: Critique and Reproduction of Power

12. Exploring the Semantics of Constructivist Representation
Alessandro Mulieri

13. The Improper Politics of Representation
Mark Devenney

14. The Constructivist Paradox: Contemporary Protest Movements and (their) Representation
Mathijs van de Sande.

About the author

Lisa Disch is Professor of Political Science and teaches political theory at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (US). Author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Cornell University Press 1994), The Tyranny of the Two-Party System (Columbia University Press 2002), and co-editor (with Mary Hawkesworth) of the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Oxford University Press 2016), she works on feminist theory, democratic theory, and environmental political theoryMathijs van de Sande teaches political philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen. In 2017, he obtained his PhD at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven with a thesis on the prefigurative repertoire of recent assembly movements, such as Occupy Wall Street. His main research interests are radical democratic theory, political representation, activism and social movement theory.Nadia Urbinati teaches political theory at Columbia University, New York (US). She works on democratic theory, and in particular representative democracy, populism, plebiscitary leadership, post-party representation.Nadia Urbinati is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Democracy Disfigured, Democracy: Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Harvard University Press, 2014) and of Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Summary

This edited volume provides the first comprehensive introduction to and critical exploration of the "constructivist turn" in political representation, the reorientation of scholarship on mass democracy toward the constitutive or mobilizing aspects of political representation.

Product details

• Authors: Lisa Van De Sande Disch, Disch Lisa
• Assisted by: Mathijs van de Sande (Editor), Lisa Disch (Editor), Nadia Urbinati (Editor), Mathijs van de Sande (Editor)
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2018
• EAN: 9781474442602
• ISBN: 978-1-4744-4260-2
• No. of pages: 208
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education